Your first week with a new animal

Bring them home on a day you can stay in. The first hours set the tone, and an animal that arrives to an empty house learns that the house is not safe.

Set up one small space before they arrive — a crate, a pen, a single room. A whole house is too much choice for an animal that does not yet know where anything is. Food, water, a bed, and a place to hide. That is enough.

Keep the food they were already eating for the first week, even if you plan to switch. A new home, new water and new food at once is the most common cause of a first-week stomach upset. Change the food gradually after they have settled, mixing a little more of the new food in each day.

Expect quiet, and expect it to break. Many animals are subdued for two or three days and then start showing who they actually are around day four or five. Behaviour in week one is not a preview of the animal you will have in month three.

Book a vet visit in the first week even if nothing is wrong. It establishes a baseline, gets you into a practice before you need one urgently, and catches anything the seller did not know about. Bring whatever records came with the animal.

Write down what you see: eating, drinking, toileting, sleeping, energy. If something goes wrong later, the vet's first question is what changed, and a week of plain notes answers it better than memory.

When to call a vet rather than wait: not eating for more than 24 hours, repeated vomiting or diarrhoea, laboured breathing, a limp that does not improve, or any sudden change in behaviour. Waiting is cheaper than a visit right up until it is not.